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For three seasons and four years, And Just Like That… has held Sex and the City fans hostage—but now that its final episode has aired, we’re finally free again. I know plenty of fans like myself who despised the series but nevertheless couldn’t put it down, mostly for the sake of seeing what our beloved ladies are getting up to in their middle age. It was the TV equivalent of the whole milk latte you order every morning despite the bowel-churning it inevitably causes. People either loved to hate it or hated to love it or both, somehow, at the same time.
Just a couple weekends ago, I made new friends at a birthday party when a band of women who didn’t know each other formed a circle just to talk shit about the show and the sudden announcement of its cancellation, which we couldn’t quite wrap our heads around. Even though we were in agreement about the aforementioned bowel-churning, we all knew the show checked all the boxes of what movie and TV studios consider a safe, profitable bet these days: a follow-up to a legacy show with a legacy cast primed to capitalize on everyone’s ‘90s nostalgia.
While showrunner Michael Patrick King claimed the series is ending simply because it was at “a wonderful place to stop,” my birthday party friends and I agreed it had some major problems that could have lost it enough viewers to warrant its end. Its biggest, the writing, was notorious for obvious plot holes, a lack of meaningful character development, and numerous plotlines or side characters fans found irrelevant or annoying (sorry, Che Diaz, but you know it’s true). Its wardrobe choices, a defining characteristic of the show’s predecessor, also drew criticism and inspired much online debate. But And Just Like That… had another, sneakier issue that I think played a big role in its downfall, and that was its approach to beauty.
In a nutshell, its characters were polished to a nonsensical degree, even in situations where it didn’t make sense for them to be polished at all. That might not be a big deal to some, and, yes, I can point to plenty of TV series that are fun to watch despite taking the same approach. But the issue for And Just Like That… became so painfully obvious once I’d noticed it that it wound up being the straw that broke the camel’s back—the camel’s back being my interest in the characters I once adored.
Carrie in “Apples to Apples” after riding an ATV to a local boutique to buy fresh clothes… becuase she didn’t pack any… nor did she pack a full beauty routine…
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery
It was season three’s fourth episode, “Apples to Apples,” that did for me. In it, Carrie spends an awkward weekend with Aidan and his family in Virginia after spontaneously extending what otherwise would have been a day-trip; one scene shows Carrie rustling from sleep fully clothed and totally alone in his bed on her first morning there. Her comically poofy maxi skirt splayed over the sheets somehow wasn’t enough to distract me from her full face of makeup and her shiny, slicked-back bun, both far too flawless to have endured so much as a catnap.
It’s not uncommon for women to be depicted in obvious makeup or with overstyled hair in these kinds of scenes, sure, but this particular instance nagged at me in a way it usually doesn’t. It wasn’t just an unrealistically beautiful display of a woman waking up somewhere unfamiliar. Much of this episode’s plot revolved around the fact that Carrie didn’t pack anything—including beauty products and a change of clothes—given that she hadn’t planned to stay overnight. I found myself asking how anyone would find it acceptable to sleep in such an uncomfortable state while crashing at their supposed boyfriend’s place. Did Aidan not offer to lend her one of his T-shirts and some face wash (or at least a bar of soap)? Did she not feel comfortable asking to borrow them for just one night? Or did she just care so much about appearing put-together that she would rather have slept in itchy tulle and mascara than a bare face and men’s boxers? Who does that?
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Charlotte having an uncomfortable run-in at her husband’s cancer treatment center in “Silent Mode."
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery
As I processed those unanswered questions through the rest of the episode, I could feel my connection to Carrie snapping like a rubber band stretched past its limits. I don’t think the show’s production team meant to imply what I inferred from that scene, but it didn’t change the fact that she had glossed over and even justified a frustrating number of red flags Aidan had waved before this. Carrie’s knack for questionable decision-making in her 30s is what made her a captivatingly (and sometimes infuriatingly) relatable character in Sex and the City, but watching her wake up in her long-distance, low-commitment boyfriend’s house in full glam and then act like things were peachy keen as a 50-something went beyond questionable—she seemed completely detached from the reality of the situation, as if she’d been wiped clean of all the dating lessons we watched her learn so many years ago. She felt almost like a stranger.
From thereon out, these instances of over-polish were all I could see when I watched the show, one of which even felt like a personal attack. Earlier in the season, Charlotte’s husband Harry learns he has prostate cancer, which he asks Charlotte to keep a secret—and she manages to until a scene in episode six, “Silent Mode,” wherein she runs into Carrie at a pharmacy and ends up tearfully confiding in her about Harry’s diagnosis. Sobbing in Carrie’s arms, Charlotte looks as she always does with her sculpted barrel waves and full-coverage porcelain complexion. Kristin Davis makes a meal out of the performance, and her tears are so believable until you realize there’s no running mascara, no streaks in her base makeup, no hair falling into her face. I couldn’t help but imagine a director calling cut mid-sob so someone could touch up Davis’s makeup before it dared to smudge.
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Ironically enough, I watched that episode not long after my own father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and I had been a wreck for months at that point. I was barely taking showers and washing my face let alone styling my hair or putting on makeup. In a way it gladdened me to see a show tackling what I’ve learned is a rather common but underdiscussed experience, but watching Charlotte maintain her impenetrable Upper East Side façade in that moment and beyond while I was sporting stained sweatpants, unwashed hair, and a greasy, tear-soaked face undermined the physical and emotional exhaustion that cancer patients and their loved ones face in reality. As a result, Charlotte, my favorite character in the whole franchise, simply didn’t feel as real to me as she did before.
Lisa Todd Wexler during a tense meeting about her father’s funeral plans in “Silent Mode.”
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery
There are more examples I could get into (like Lisa Todd Wexler mourning the death of her father in the cuntiest little bob of all time), but that last tidbit really says it all. Whether people are actively clocking them or not, the choices made by a show’s hair and makeup department are an integral part of the storytelling process. They can make the difference between a viewer feeling embedded in a fictional world and a viewer being distracted by the sense that something’s off (this also played out with The Last of Us earlier this year). When it’s done with intention, putting a character in a ponytail versus a blowout or showing dark circles instead of covering them up clues us into how a character is feeling beyond what they say out loud.
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The glam in Sex and the City was arguably overdone at times, too, but it was intentional, reflecting its characters’ personalities and evolutions in the way they colored, cut, or styled their hair, among other things (Carrie’s corkscrew curls didn’t become iconic just because they were pretty). In the case of And Just Like That… the hairstyling and makeup seemingly had little intention other than making its actors look beautiful.
We could argue about whether these fictional women use their hyper-polished looks as a way to exert control in their lives, and I won’t deny there’s merit to that argument. But like Sex and the City, the whole schtick of And Just Like That… is telling stories that convey what it’s really like to be a modern-day woman. But, much as we’d like to, women in real life rarely look picture-perfect through phases of grief or frustration or confusion. Carrie’s invincibly slick buns or Charlotte’s impressively tear-proof makeup surely aren’t the reason for the show’s cancellation—but I can’t deny that it would have been objectively better if we’d been allowed to see the less polished versions of them—the versions that actually reflect reality.
